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Just a thought

Michael, could you rerun the power tests under Fedora 17 KDE? Dont have to post an article about it if you dont want, but just a link to the results would be nice. I ask because Compiz/Unity have been refactored like crazy in the recent year or so, Gnome (mutter) got a major makeover with the 3.x, im curious to see what Kwin is doing since that codebase has been in the "optimization" stage of development for a couple of years now, plus Martin has even made a few blog posts directly related to Kwin/KDE power management. Atleast this would help in regards to narrowing down what is causing the increased power usage, whether its terminal-userspace (background processes) vs graphical userspace (Gnome/KDE/Unity) vs all in the kernel.

Is it possible for a HW agnostic OS like Linux to beat a HW specific OS when it comes to Power Consumption. I assume that Linux would require quite some tweaking to perform the same.

Absolutely it's very possible despite what the appleites and consolers might tell you. The main issue is drivers, which unless someone says otherwise I'm going to assume that the MBP 2010 was their usual Intel IGP + Nvidia gpu, which means yeah... no optimus yet and nouveau not really being set up for power management yet, of course it's going to be more power hungry. The other issue is potentially undocumented EFI hacks that Apple might be using. Since they do control the entire stack it is very possible for them to have EFI and thus ACPI weirdness in an attempt to cut out people from running other OSes on their systems, or at the very least to cast them in a worse light.

Why is Windows 8 not part of the upcoming comparison? The RTM version has been out for over a week. It's only fair especially since you're comparing Ubuntu 12.10 which is very far from being released officially. It's pretty easy to get a Windows 8 ISO from TechNet (I can provide that for you), then get a CDKey from a torrent just to install it. As long as you don't activate the OS, the pirated key shouldn't be a problem. You can go 30 days before you need to activate a Windows 8 installation with a CDKey. Unfortunately, you need to put in a BS key before the install starts unlike Windows 7.

Now now, there are far more sophisticated ways of making fun of his Hipsterbook wannaBeAPro. You could even point out the new Apple product: the iDiot. Point is it's more fun if you aren't so blunt, and are more witty.